In his work Stars (1979), Richard Dyer argues that the role of celebrities in society is much more complex than just the result of a manufactured persona. For Dyer, the celebrity is constructed in part through the range of texts that circulates around them (blogs, reviews, etc.), and also through the way that they reflect our desire to be individuals. The star or celebrity emerges at a particular nexus and time because they represent something about the social. Thus for Dyer, Marilyn Monroe’s stardom is fuelled by the way she represents a safe expression of female sexuality at a time of changing social roles in the 1950s, a kind of sexy office worker who, while sexualized, never really challenges men. The image of the celebrity therefore has little to do with the actual person themselves, but their representation. The audience remain in a parasocial or one-way relationship with the celebrity, and because they cannot be known, they are read through the texts that circulate about them. The celebrity functions a social fantasy, a kind of avatar for working through broader issues in culture.

Critical approaches to celebrity culture are particularly useful in looking at the tragic case of Charlotte Dawson’s death. Because Dawson herself is not known to many of the commentators, or can only be partially known, the way that her death is perceived reveals much more about New Zealand and Australian culture and views on femininity than it does about Dawson herself. At best, her motivations, her internal turmoil can only be read through hack psychology. What is interesting about these readings (and the comments that people have made on her death), however, is the way that Dawson is often read through the lens of a divisive “good” and “bad” femininity – one which positions her beauty and choice of industry as a Faustian agreement that undermines her ability for an authentic existence as a “good woman”.

For example, in Deborah Hill Cone’s article yesterday, depression is removed as a cause for Dawson’s death, as well as the personal challenges she faces in her life. Rather, for Cone, Dawson’s death was about aging and the desire to preserve a youthful image rather than confront the aging process. Her death was the result of what Cone terms “narcissistic injury”. Says Cone, “women who can’t bear the shift to a supporting role may ape the behaviours, clothing and attitudes of the young, trying to preserve their sexual appeal. They may opt for plastic surgery”. Cone is not the only one to propagate this narrative – in many of the comments, there seems to be the perception that as Dawson courted publicity, she should be able to handle it. “Why didn’t she shut down her Twitter?”, many ask.

Ironically, much of this kind of analysis reflects many of the reasons she was bullied in the first place. Perceived as having bad femininity, Dawson was a celebrity that many relished in defining themselves against. As much as we like to have celebrities we identify with, we also like to have the ones we rally against. What was remarkable about this bullying is the way it cut across elements of society – it was not just Bieberites or teen One Directioners that were trolling her online, it was employees of Monash University. It is the same in death. These responses tell us much more about ourselves than they will ever do about depression or Dawson. Cone’s article is representative of much wider and older stereotypes about women of the Madonna and the whore, and cast into this narrative her suicide is positioned as the punitive result of poor career choices to pursue her celebrity rather than her intelligence. Cone’s message is clear: smart women like her are less vulnerable because they take heed and incorporate the norms.

While it is probably impossible to resolve or even begin to deal with the gender bias around the way this reinforces stereotypes in one piece, let’s start here: let’s throw out the idea that assessments of women should be based on how she looks and how she enacts her sexuality. Those same stereotypes, after all, are the reasons why some of my friends have to spend time actively altering their appearances to look less attractive in business, or the same reason why sometimes in business meetings with people I don’t know, people assume I must be sleeping with someone because despite being 35 I still look young. I’m not sure about sending people to prison for three years for bullying, or how much this piece contributes to a broader discussion we need to have about the social stigmas around mental illness (which is totally different than aging), but one of the places we need to start is with women supporting each other. We should be able to wear what we want, look how we want, and have control of our own bodies. And perhaps in this tragedy there is a starting point for this discussion.

This week the Office of Film and Literature Classification made one of their most perplexing decisions to date: to ban a film for general release featuring Frodo (Elijah Wood). The film can now only be seen at the Festival and screened in tertiary institutions. In the long-standing tradition of tensions between the International Film Festival organizers and the censorship bodies, which has generated controversy around films such as The Bridge and Baise Moi, the censors have yet again proved that they don’t seem to have a handle on what constitutes art.

After sitting through Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart (2004) in the International Film Festival a few years back, when they said Maniac was banned in New Zealand, I was anticipating bad things. If A Hole in My Heart featured a couple of deadbeats making a porn film at home interspersed with labial reconstructive surgery and images of pistols fucking pocket pussies, as well as scenes of sexual intimidation that left me feeling enraged (and unable to sleep), I thought the censors’ decision to single out Maniac would mean that it crossed boundaries. Instead, Maniac was an interesting yet relatively tame film in comparison. The only reason I can come to think of that New Zealand is the only country in the world to ban Maniac is that it features an evil Frodo.

Maniac is the story of a dysfunctional mannequin restorer who has a torn relationship with his mother. The scalp collecting killer is played brilliantly by Elijah Wood in a way that demonstrates the strength of his repertoire, the film is shot largely in first-person, and we experience the film through Frank’s perspective. The violence is brutal but certainly not anything beyond many of the films that are uncensored in New Zealand. It is also relatively brief. Like other films in the genre, Maniac uses horror to explore the plight of women in consumer culture, mental illness, and dysfunctional families. The film is a remake of William Lustig’s film of the same name, but it shifts the locale from Times Square to downtown Los Angeles, allowing for lots of shots of the tents of the homeless on Skid Row to permeate the film, drawing for a subtle mediation on the seedy underbelly of consumer culture – Hollywood’s dream has become America’s nightmare.

As someone who has seen a lot of horror, for the life of me I cannot figure out why this film is banned. The first-person perspective is disturbing, but then again there are multiple video games that demonstrate far higher interactivity and are first-person shooters which are routinely allowed onto the market. The film has experienced a surge in piracy in New Zealand, demonstrating that traditional notions of censorship no longer apply. While Maniac is violent, I’ve seen far more damaging perspectives on women in Burger King commercials. At least this film asks for a kind of interrogation of our thoughts on gender and power, which is more than I can say for a lot of the casually misogynist material that we are exposed to on a daily basis.

They say there is a kernel of truth in every rumour, and the events in Egypt over the last few weeks have proved this. First a mass petition, then a mass protest, then a military coup, then a media shutdown and then a massacre. As the old dictum goes, the first casualty in war is the truth. Or as John Pilger suggests, the first casualty is journalism. The events in Egypt have seen dedicated people on all sides attempting to circulate information, but it is clear that this information is becoming too polarized and the discourses too sedimented. If Egypt is to avoid further violence then this is the first thing that must change.

For the pro-Morsi protestors, the events constitute a military takeover of a legitimate government, as Morsi emphasized 57 times in his 45 minute final speech before being snatched by the military to an undisclosed location. Part of Morsi’s problems are those of many democracies in the west – he won with a majority, winning 51.7% of the vote, but only million more votes than the candidate Ahmed Shafiq, who represented Mubarak’s regime. While the ability to pass policies and appeal to the people is a problem of all democracies, in Morsi’s case this problem was exacerbated by the post-Revolution Egypt he inherited, which had a flailing economy and polarized factions which, having come together under the broad banner of the Revolution were then having trouble cooperating. Overthrown as Egypt’s first democratically elected President by protestors (who were backed by the opposition and Salafist party Al-Nour) and the military, the military have moved swiftly in a crackdown on the Brotherhood in a move that they maintain is necessary to quell the violence. After Morsi defiantly pledged to shed his blood rather than step down, the military arrested Morsi and more than 300 Muslim Brotherhood members. This was accompanied by a media shutdown, where the eight Islamist channels were shut down as well as Al Jazeera. In despair at losing their elected President, Muslim Brotherhood supporters have hit the streets. In a sit-in at the Rabaa Ardiwiya mosque, 51 Brotherhood supporters lost their lives when the military fired on them in the worst incidence of human rights abuses since the Maspero massacre.

For the anti-Morsi protestors, the international media’s response has been to gloss over the conditions that led to this. Certainly, since the military coup the Muslim Brotherhood have hardly been the most reliable source, often shooting themselves in the foot. From releasing images on their official account of dead Syrian babies as being present at the sit-in in Rabaa (in fact no children were there), to images of protests from November as occurring today, the Ikhwan are proving themselves unaware of the powers of reverse image search. Having accused the other side of inflating numbers, the Muslim Brotherhood are now basing their numbers for protests on the calculation of an implausible 18-25 people per square meter. While the Muslim Brotherhood certainly have a strong moral argument as to why they should have been allowed to lead, there is little doubt that they have consistently been their own worst enemy in terms of checking and verifying facts. Anti-Morsi protestors argue that the accounts that position the Brotherhood as democratic place a veneer over the way that Morsi failed to reform the police state. They point, for example, to Morsi’s treatment of protestors that reached the Presidential Palace in December, leading to nine deaths and a number of claims of torture by Brotherhood members, an event that was tracked by human rights groups. They also point to Morsi’s extension of his powers under the Constitution, Morsi’s attempt to prosecute journalists, attacks on journalists (ironically one of these in the build up to June 30th was at a Brotherhood non-violence rally) and the persecution of foreign NGOs under the Brotherhood. Basil el-Dabh argues that some of the channels that were shut had a track record of claiming that the Copts were mobilizing militia. There is little doubt that there has been shrill media around the Brotherhood, with independent media characterizing them as ‘terrorists’, but they can hardly claim that they are above such deeds.

The distorting lens of this kind of speculation which generalizes both sides is ultimately going to be violence. All groups must carefully fact check information. This kind of echo chamber of rationalizations is incredibly evident when one looks at the role of the US. Much speculation in all of this has revolved around the US position, given its history of interfering in nation states and destabilization in Iran and Latin America. One thing is for certain, the anti-US sentiment is high in Egypt at present.

For many of the pro-Morsi protestors, the US has backed the military, which it funds to the tune of $1.5 billion a year in aid to carry out the Camp David Accords in 1979 which allow for peaceful relations with Israel. Egypt shares a border with the Gaza Strip, so the provision of military aid provides the US with a strategic military bolster with Israel, the latter of which is deeply unpopular with Egyptians due to border wars and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. The army is estimated to control 30 – 40% of the economy in Egypt, making it deeply embedded within the economy. This, together with the elites who were part of Mubarak’s rule (the felool) is referred to as Egypt’s ‘deep state’. The Muslim Brotherhood argue that Morsi has inherited a difficult economic climate and one where he has been politically isolated, limiting his efficacy. They point to the way that following Morsi’s election he was unable to take control of the judiciary, the police or the army and he faced a hostile opposition that refused to cooperate. There is certainly some evidence to suggest that this is the case. Many have pointed to the way that wheat exports seems to have been withheld by the US, based off an article by Tariq Ramadan. Egypt is reliant on imports for 40% of its wheat. Yet, once we examine this claim we see that there are other factors that have contributed to the crisis. A drought in Russia (from which Egypt gains half of its wheat) led to a ban on exports there, and extreme weather patterns also led to rising cost of US wheat exports because the supply was affected. So it is difficult to tell without further analysis of the wheat situation.

This claim was reiterated together with the one that the US has helped starve the fuel from the population to grant the grounds for the crisis in an influential article for The New York Times. As Rawah Badrawi notes, the problem with The New York Times article is that it predictably positions the ‘true’ forces undermining Egypt as a woman and a Copt, amplifying traditional sources of antagonism. If you are not familiar with the religious divides and tensions that undercut Egypt, the Copts are approximately 10% of the population who sometimes are attacked by zealots. Following the coup, the official Ikhwan press account released that Supreme Constitutional Judge Adly Mansour who was appointed Interim President was Jew who approached the Copts to be baptized, but even the Copts turned him down. When the latter attracted ire from Egyptians, the Ikhwan site took it down, which they were also criticized for, so they then put up a screen shot stating that they had released this and took it down. When I was there in April, one was killed and 39 injured in clashes during a mass funeral in Abbasiya. Following Ikhwan’s statement, a Coptic Priest in Sinai was shot dead. This is significant because an increase in sectarianism is one of the key criticisms of the anti-Morsi protestors. Morsi encountered criticism earlier in the year for remaining quiet at a rally while Sunni clerics urged Sunni Muslims to fight against Assad’s Shiia Alawite sect in Syria, an event that many saw as linked to the unusual sectarian violence that saw four Shia and Tamarod supporters lynched in June.

The question remains of what the US are doing. To me it remains completely unclear. For the anti-Morsi crowd, Obama backs the Muslim Brotherhood. On the page ‘Obama sponsors terrorism’, Obama has been photoshopped into Morsi and Osama Bin Laden. Why then, when the other side has a compelling narrative, would they equate Obama with the Muslim Brotherhood? Well, US Ambassador Anne Patterson repeatedly made statements urging against military intervention and Obama has recently come out in a statement urging the Army to release the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi. An interview with military advisors early on stated that they felt the US was unhappy with them for the coup. The issue of coup or no coup was so sensitive that CNN had to remove their cameras from Tahrir Square due to protestor anger at them calling it a coup. Ex-pat Egyptians marched on the CNN building in New York a few days ago. Ironically, Obama is also under attack domestically from Conservatives who argue that his policy has been to support moderate Islam, a policy they argue was doomed to failure due to the instability of the nation states in transition. While some have argued that the support of the coup from some Israeli commentators evidences US support, it is not clear to me that this is the case. The support for Assad in some military circles was based on the notion of stability, rather than overthrow to liberal democracy. Considering the penchant of the Israelis to jump to a defensive worst-case scenario first, one might think that the parallels that people have made to Pakistan and Algeria might have already been modeled. In my own personal opinion, I think the US was certainly working to slightly undermine Morsi, but did not want an all out coup as it brings another unstable player into a region that it appears in spite of their efforts they are not able to control.

None of the above justifies a military coup. While Morsi definitely had opportunities to reach across and the Opposition definitely made this difficult (this is what an Opposition does), there is absolutely nothing that justifies this kind of extrajudicial detention. It may have the effect of mobilizing groups towards violence rather than pursuing democratic solutions. The Army may be the group with the greatest organizational and military power, but it still is not well perceived by protestors on both sides and they are the people who are capable of getting masses of people out on the streets. But events in Egypt also highlight how we all have a responsibility to learn, to attempt to gather information, and to not base our entire perception on a ready made narrative.

Watching The Vote this week it became clear: I need Christine Rankin in my kitchen. She reckons that she can feed six people for a week on $20. While there are not six people in my house, and no young growing minds, if she can make 126 nutritious meals for $20 – a remarkable 16 cents per meal – she is the kind of kitchen goddess I need. I’m not poor but I am down with the idea of saving money. Perhaps I could have Hannah Tamaki as well in my home, and do away the need for those pesky electricity bills. Apparently all I need to do in winter is cuddle under a sack filled with radiating love, the kind of glorious love that fills Destiny Church. At this point, Bob McCroskey could ride on in on his fancy unicorn and rustle me up a happy family unit and we could all cuddle together.

The episode of The Vote this week was interesting because it tapped so clearly into the notions of the deserving versus undeserving poor. While television is a medium that due to the nature of its emphasis on commercial priorities is not really geared to examining complex issues at length, this particular episode was fascinating for the way that it exemplified the reductive dichotomies that shape our discussion of poverty in this country. Cue the highly emotive (and biased) opening sequence where we are introduced to a young boy called Jason who is abused by his parents. The question was is poverty or parenting the main problem? There was no preface that outlined the results of the reports, or even the links between poverty and violence and abuse. This made for a somewhat tedious debate – clearly there are upper class people that abuse their children, making the proposition easy to refute. But it also had the effect of demonizing people who are poor who are clearly trying to look after their children. The resulting vote of 63% in favour of the proposition that it was parenting that was the problem was hardly surprising.

But what are the actual statistics? Is it truly possible to feed your children on the 37 cents per meal or the 16 cents that Rankin later changed it too (as she stated, Weetbix goes a long way). The nutrition costs estimated by the Food Cost for Human Nutrition by the University of Otago in 2012 were $29 for the basic meal requirements for a one-year-old child, meaning that Rankin appears to be advocating malnutrition and starvation as a solution for our nation’s children. While she did state that she based this amount on the estimates that she has seen, she did not state her source. Rankin appears to be completely out of touch with the contemporary cost of food.

According to Family First’s Bob McCroskey, poverty was the result of relying on loan sharks and spending money on the wrong things. I have known solo mothers who have had little more than $5 over in their weekly budget who have not spent their money on the wrong things, so the link here appears to be somewhat spurious. It totally makes sense that if you are not economically literate, or if you receive a big dental, power or car bill that you might approach a loan shark to keep your household afloat after you have been turned down by banks. The problem he further identified of sending money back to the islands appeared to narrow his assertions to particular racial groups and then undercut his assertion that the problem is the breakdown of families (sending money back, after all, is an act of looking after one’s family).

Destiny Church’s Hannah Tamaki’s assertion that poor families could all sleep together under the same blanket cuts against doctors’ recommendations as it promotes the sharing of infectious diseases, further adding to the 38,000 admissions that doctors saw in 2011 from overcrowding.

Finally, the proposition that Espiner kept forwarding of poverty not necessarily being linked to abuse (this was of course the link that the programme began with) was really underdeveloped (not unsurprisingly). The same Child Action Poverty Group Report that McCroskey kept citing to assert that there was no link between poverty and abuse cites this as a key aggravating factor.

While the debate had some important additions – most notably Celia Lashlie’s explanations of the affect that poverty has on families, it demonstrated how much as a nation we need to move towards understanding poverty rather than castigating people who are poor through stereotypes.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/06/22/126-meals-for-20-show-us-how/feed/40A Dunne Drama: Let’s focus on the important bit – the policyhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/06/08/a-dunne-drama-lets-focus-on-the-important-bit-the-policy/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/06/08/a-dunne-drama-lets-focus-on-the-important-bit-the-policy/#commentsFri, 07 Jun 2013 19:34:28 +0000http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=16767Peter Dunne’s resignation following the David Henry report that indicates he leaked the Kitteridge Report into the GCSB came as a shock to many yesterday. Much of the commentary on this has focused on Dunne’s personality, with some commentators such as Jane Clifton and Whaleoil implying that his decision to leak was due to a midlife crisis where he was swept away by a crush on a press gallery journalist. If this is true, he would hardly be the first or the last politician to attempt to use their post to hit on journalists and staff (the majority of such incidents remaining the chatter of the press gallery). Dunne himself said that he could not quite explain what came over him, or why he has only released half of the letters to Henry.

Dunne’s performance this week certainly demonstrated little of the nous that has allowed him to survive as a “common sense” army of one for an extraordinarily long time in Parliament, attaching himself as an accouterment to whatever coalition party happens to be in fashion. His demotion does place additional pressure on a weakened National, whose slim majority is already being eroded by John Banks’ continuing amnesia regarding receiving envelopes of money and taking scenic helicopter rides with world famous pirates. Winston Peters’ sixth political sense for drama is out in force, ensuring that the lead up to the next election is likely to be a tad more entertaining than usual.

Yet what is lost in this drive towards the personalization of politics and news cycles is the politics itself. Despite his ability to caricature himself with his Renaissance wave and planking stunts, Dunne occasionally bites the hand that feeds, as in his decision as Minister of Revenue to pursue high income tax evasion cases and his withdrawal of support for Charter Schools (citing his ethical concerns around employing unregistered teachers). While I suspect his desire to remain at the table in this instance (assuming that he was indeed the leak) overrides his ethical concerns around the GCSB Report, it is a travesty that the implications of the Report itself and the new legislation being rammed through around the GCSB’s new powers to cover up retrospective illegality is not receiving more attention.

I for one was shocked to pick up The Weekend Herald two weeks ago and see that the Government was beta testing ThinThread technology for metadata surveillance on the New Zealand population in 2000-2001. There is a reason why the GCSB is dedicated to foreign threats and the SIS is dedicated to New Zealand surveillance, and it is to prevent this kind of mission creep towards the surveillance of ordinary New Zealand citizens.

The leaking of the Kitteridge Report to Vance allowed for some intelligent journalism around these fundamental issues of our rights as citizens. The Kitteridge Report showed some important failings in the GCSB that require further oversight – disorganization, concern around legality and the illegal spying on 89 New Zealand citizens – all of which has somehow been put through the public relations spinometer as benefiting New Zealanders and power that the GCSB should already have. The national conversation that should be about our civil liberties keeps getting subsumed by the personalities in the equation and paranoia over potential terror attacks.

I don’t really care about speculation over whether Dunne has done a Clinton. It’s not like he was instagramming his penis like US Senator Anthony Weiner – from all accounts it seems like a couple of tweets and some emails. The more important issue is the legislation, and the potential impact Dunne’s demotion will have on the coalition government. I don’t have to agree with every single statement that comes out of a politician’s mouth to support them on issues of confluence. It seems extraordinary to me that Norman on behalf of the Greens is calling for the police to investigate – it would be better to let Peters lead that line of attack, given that he has continually complained about the level of secrecy around the Security Committee. At the end of the day, it is not about a soap opera, it is about our rights as citizens. And this needs to be the focus of the opposition, not continuing the blood bath for political points.

In the strangest column of the week, security consultant and former NZ Army analyst Aaron Lim stated that the extending the GSCB’s powers could protect us from a Boston or Madrid styled terrorist attack. Stating that “a quick scan on the global map reveals a global environment filled with conflict zones, ranging from the traditional battles between nation states in North Korea; a protracted civil war in Syria and low intensity attacks such as Boston and Madrid”, Lim’s claims, hyperbolic as they are (anyone who loses sleep over Syrians attacking here probably needs their head checked), are worth examining as they engage with some of the key debates around the surveillance society that is being promoted as a solution to potential unrest in New Zealand.

The widespread uptake of digital technologies in the last 20 years or so and the enhanced possibilities that this has offered for tracking has been accompanied by a loss of privacy for individuals at a level never seen before in history. Think, for example, of the way that an individual is photographed more than 300 times per day in the course of their daily existence in London, the city with the most CCTV in the world; the way that every communication is scanned and is checked for keywords in the United States; or the way that companies could sell technologies to change the content of activists’ emails in a failed attempt to stop the uprising in Tunisia.

As William Staples highlights in his work Everyday Surveillance (2000), the notion that such surveillance only affects those that are outside of the law is somewhat mistaken. The technology is by its very nature pre-emptive of crime in its dependence on keywords. What this means is that essentially gross invasions of privacy are exchanged for this extra information. While this might seem like a good idea, think of how this information can be misread. One example that springs to mind is the UK woman Naomi Oni who suffered an acid attack earlier this year. When she complained to police, they began investigating her because her internet searches prior to the incident revealed that she had Googled Katie Piper, a former model who also had suffered an acid attack. Another woman has been charged with the attack, but the incident demonstrates how easy it is to put two and two together and get seven. This, together with the contemporary research that tells us that the reasons that people harm others are complex and can’t be condensed down to simple equations of radicalization equaling terrorism, explains why the record on preventing terrorism even with the increase of surveillance powers has been somewhat woeful.

The notion that more surveillance might have prevented the Boston bombings is absurd and demonstrates a general lack of knowledge of the security environment that has pervaded in the United States since 9/11. As this Washington Post investigation reveals, 854,000 people have top level security clearance and people within the industry feel that the number of people engaged in surveillance has grown so exponentially in the last decade that it is impossible to tell how much the state spends on it, and which agencies double up in monitoring. Or in other words, if the GCSB is as inaccurate as Rebecca Kitteridge’s report on the GCSB operations finds, the new legislation opening up this department for foreign agencies to spy on New Zealand citizens further exposes our citizens to the threat of surveillance that operates outside the law or for reasons that don’t hold up to the kind of scrutiny that warrants this level of intrusion.

The Tsarnaev brothers allegedly responsible for the Boston bombing highlight this problem. While they had been flagged by the US along with no doubt hundreds of others on a watchlist, they don’t really fit any traditional paradigms of theories on radicalization leading to terrorism – for a start they did not leave a statement, and new information is emerging implicating the older brother in the murder of three people in a botched drug deal (hardly an example of piousness). All that surveillance and what do we see? Mob mentality. Speculation on Reddit that a young student is the backpacker bomber, leading to his suicide. A plane forced to turn around back to Boston because passengers object to some passengers speaking Arabic. And the FBI interrogating Saudi students with rice cookers who are making dinner for their friends. The fact is that there is no simple equation for why people go out and do these things. The current categories are as woefully inaccurate as the FBI’s Freudian profiling of serial killers. If creating a surveillance society was so successful in preventing crime, there is no way the FBI would be following students cooking kabsah.

It is not a stretch to imagine that in future years the amount that is currently spent on surveillance in societies like the US and the UK is considered wasteful in light of the failure to prevent terror attacks. If the experience following 9/11 has taught us anything at all, it is that while some surveillance is necessary for state security, we should be keeping an eye on what can easily become bloated departments where the call for secrecy outweighs any need for rational oversight. And this is why I absolutely cannot see the benefits for New Zealanders in rushing through legislation that increases the GCSB’s ability for surveillance without further review into first ensuring that their current operations conform to best practice. This is the stupidity of phrasing such arguments as two dichotomous poles – of course there needs to be some surveillance, but of course we need to carefully examine as a society what the boundaries of that should be.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/05/25/the-limits-of-surveillance-societies/feed/6A sad day for disability rightshttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/05/19/a-sad-day-for-disability-rights/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/05/19/a-sad-day-for-disability-rights/#commentsSun, 19 May 2013 03:47:07 +0000http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=13439This week the Government moved to pass legislation that allocated $92 million over the next four years to pay carers of the disabled minimum wage. Supported by National, Act, United Future and the Maori Party, The New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) 2013 passed three readings in just one day.

A press release from Parliament positioned the Bill as another first for New Zealand, making us the third country in the world to pay carers of the disabled the minimum wage.

So why does National’s Chris Finlayson highlight that it could be seen as violating the Bill of Rights for disabled people?

Why did Labour’s Health spokesperson Annette King say that the information circulated on this amendment constituted the “blankety-blank-blank-blank Bill”?

Is this Bill for or against disabled people? Why does New Zealand First say that it is a serious assault on the human rights of the disabled?

The rush to push through the Disability Amendment Bill is not about the $92 million that was set aside for disabled carers – it is about limiting the liability of the government in terms of who is eligible. Although ACC allows family members to be carers, the Ministry of Health previously did not recognize family carers.

They argued that taking care of spouses and children even when it was full-time work was part of the social contract that family members undertake with each other. A group of families challenged this decision by arguing that as unpaid family members working seven days a week to care for their disabled relatives they were discriminated against by the government in 2001 in The Ministry of Health v Atkinson and Ors.

This case was fought by the Ministry at a cost to the taxpayer of upwards of $1.4 million since 2008, until the Ministry eventually lost the case at the Court of Appeal. This paved the way for the allocation of minimum wage to a limited number of families as announced in this budget.

However, what is disturbing about this Bill is the way that it seeks to limit the rights of a group that have historically suffered from discrimination. As Labour’s David Shearer commented, they would be looking to restrict costs as well. This highlights how discussions on disability have traditionally been phrased within utilitarian arguments on the cost to the entire population. Yet the Bill’s move to limit the Bill of Rights in terms of removing discrimination for family members goes too far. Offering carers support should not come at the expense of having rights removed, particularly for a group that have historically born the brunt of so much discrimination (think for example of the rise of the institutionalization of the disabled in the 1700s and the government arguments around eugenics in the west in the early 20th century). This is a Bill that should not have been passed as quickly as it did and would have benefited from further discussions. The claim that we are the third country in the world to provide this benefit detracts from the way that it essentially limits future claims and the future rights of our most vulnerable. It also detracts from future discussions about how other countries deal with the rights of family carers – such as the other countries that provide benefits to a wider range of carers.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/05/19/a-sad-day-for-disability-rights/feed/10Inquiry must be held into GCSB before Bill extending their powers is passedhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/05/11/inquiry-must-be-held-into-gcsb-before-bill-extending-their-powers-is-passed/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/05/11/inquiry-must-be-held-into-gcsb-before-bill-extending-their-powers-is-passed/#commentsSat, 11 May 2013 02:01:56 +0000http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=12171The Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill passed its first reading this week by 61 to 59, with the support of National, ACT and United Future. The current Bill, together with the parallel Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill, represent the extension of the GCSB’s powers to spy on ordinary New Zealanders at a time when the fundamental concern should be strengthening compliance and safeguards.

The GCSB saga has made for riveting reading in a phenomenal story – foreign millionaires, the FBI, corruption among politicians (such as John Banks’ amnesia over his helicopter ride), and the illegal spying on 88 New Zealanders. The passing of the Bill (which will now be sent to the Security Intelligence Committee for review before its second reading) coincides with the release of a so-called ‘White Paper’ by Kim Dotcom’s legal team, emphasizing the need for investigation into the structure of the GCSB and alleging that they had been spying on Dotcom for ten days longer than previously revealed.

The calls for an Inquiry into the GCSB and wider cross-party support by opposition parties in this case are prudent. The March release of Rebecca Kitteridge’s report into the GCSB’s operations made for damning reading. Kitteridge found that:

Staff were confused about the legality of their own operations;

The organization lacked a central repository for legal guidelines;

The organization was more focused on its overseas partnerships and their guidelines through Signals Intelligence than compliance with New Zealand law and the GCSB Act;

That training in compliance in some cases was limited to a 40 minute Powerpoint when staff began working at the organization;

That there was no system for reporting errors; and

That there had been no quarterly reports since 2011.

As Mai Chen argued last month on The Nation, if the GCSB was a private company “heads would roll, people would be sacked”.

While Kitteridge’s key point seems to be that the GCSB was more focussed on other countries’ legislation (the US and Britain), Key has argued that the main finding of the report is that the GCSB Act needs to be clarified to widen its powers to cooperate with the NZ Police and the SIS. Stating that Kitteridge’s report highlighted the need for further oversight, Key has argued that the GCSB Act should be redrawn. In doing so, the GSCB Amendment Bill means that the GCSB will have wider power to spy on New Zealanders in a bid to cover over the shaky legality of the previous incidents they have been caught on. It will also allow foreign intelligence agencies to spy on domestic citizens with ministerial approval.

The notion of separating the focus of the GCSB towards external threats and the SIS towards internal threats was meant to provide some democratic safeguards that ensure that ordinary New Zealanders are not being spied on for anything that might be loosely considered a threat to the state. Opening up the Police, the SIS and potentially other agencies up to the broader powers of the GCSB has potentially huge ramifications for civil liberties. The idea that this warrantless interception be rushed through without wider Parliamentary debate following a slew of legislation that has effectively eroded civil liberties within New Zealand is totally irresponsible and an assault on New Zealanders’ basic human rights.

The reaction to the Greens and Labour’s plans to introduce a single buyer model to the electricity market has been nothing short of extreme. Business NZ’s open letter condemning the move as destabilizing the stock market, destroying KiwiSaver and frightening foreign investment was extraordinary, although not as severe as the National Party’s calls that it was introducing Soviet-style nationalization. Duncan Garner this week on RadioLive argued that the reduction in revenue was stripping the government of vital funds that would be used for education and building roads. Colin Espinor has said the same, comparing it to “Third World, funny money stuff”.

Taking these claims one by one, it is clear that the electricity debate is much more complex than it is being positioned by the right. KiwiSaver fund managers, for example, declared last month that they would only be looking at investing 0.5% – 1% of their funds in the electricity shares, so the notion that the partial privatization is some kind of panacea for the retirement of hard-working citizens is fundamentally overdetermined. This reticence on the behalf of KiwiSaver providers perhaps reflects the lack of independent information available on Mighty River Power shares, as Nigel Tate, President of the Institute of Financial Advisors signaled to Rod Oram in late April before the Labour-Greens announcement. Brian Gaynor prior to the announcement had signaled that the shares are more risky than investments for Mums and Dads in the local bank. The excitement that was generated around the pre-investment of shares was also a tad misleading – a pre-registering interest process that involves a mere email address is not going to provide anywhere the real numbers that will actually follow through with their wallet. Add to this the fact that Treasury had already indicated in December last year that floating all power companies before the end of National’s election term was unlikely to receive the returns that were anticipated because they would flood the market and the response seems a little hysterical.

It is fair to say that there has been an emphasis on the liberalization of power markets internationally, particularly in the way the IMF has promoted this as a suitable reform. The idea is that having competitive companies means that the demand is more likely to match the supply. In times of a crisis, the consumers who need the electricity will pay the most for it. As the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Crisis and Regulation (NZISCR) highlights, from this perspective it is the responsibility of the consumer to be aware of their need for electricity after more than 20 years of reform. While the NZISCR praises the invisible hand of Adam Smith for ensuring that power companies in a competitive market continue supply, it is worth noting that it still took the establishment of an Electricity Commission in 2003 to ensure that more effort was made to cater for the dry years.

As Markandya, Bigano, Porchia emphasize in their work The Social Cost of Electricity: Scenarios and Policy Implications (2011), both models of state regulation and economic liberalization have their downsides. The downside to the liberalization model is that the drive to secure supply in dry years is filtered through the motivations of profit and economic viability, rather than the social imperative in politics to secure the public good. As they conclude, the literature on whether a model of economic liberalization is successful in securing supply is contested and there are vulnerabilities in the European market to shortage of supply.

Which brings me back to the original point that was made in my first blog on electricity: it is a mistake to view the electricity debate solely through one model or another. Oliver Hartwich’s assertion that attempts at electricity regulation will place New Zealand in some kind of way-back machine that results in the kind of power blackouts which occurred in the 1970s is redundant and ignores the social and environmental context of the time – a growing demand that outstripped supply, a dry period for hydropower and the economic shocks of the Oil Crisis that punctuated this period. As electricity consultants Geoff Bertram and Brian Leyland have argued, more concern needs to be placed on government oversight. And as Bertram highlights, this is much more difficult to implement once the power companies have been sold. Thus while the Labour-Greens power scheme might be read as an economic carrot for those on low wages, it has the potential to engage New Zealand in a debate where more regulatory stick is needed.

The Law Commission continued its review of new media this week with their release of the report The News Media Meets ‘New Media’: Rights, Responsibilities and Regulation in the Digital Age. Commissioned by Judith Collins, the report continues the government’s investigations into how the new media environment needs to be legislated in New Zealand.

The backdrop of its release has been read against the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, which in its examination of hacking scandals looked for sometime to extend press regulations to bloggers (thus opening up political bloggers to potential libel cases and detracting from freedom of speech) and the Finkelston Inquiry. This has meant that the reception of the Law Commission’s recommendations to establish one single regulatory body and self-regulates has been received as largely positive. Some commentators have drawn attention to the way that the Law Commission intends to incentivize this, by only allocating special privileges to the media or bloggers that join. This may have the effect of meaning that it is only people who make money off the web have the financial ability to join, therefore excluding the smaller players.

The report argues that new media and traditional media boundaries are becoming fluid in a way that makes it difficult to uphold the law. The Law Commission overestimate the blend between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media in both reports, going so far to say that it is not uncommon for broadcasters to follow message boards on TradeMe in the cyberbullying report. As convergence guru Henry Jenkins argues in his work Convergence Culture: when old and new media collide (2006), the premise that the new media forms will completely replace older models of broadcasting is a utopian ideal that guided earlier discussions of the net and is largely outdated now. What we are seeing is new partnerships where old and new media exist in symbiosis. The idea that newspapers will completely become redundant then, is not entirely true, while they are currently challenged with adapting to the drop in advertising revenue due to declining print circulation, it is likely that there will be an ongoing demand for the kind of regular news that organized broadcasters provide (and bloggers are dependent on).

However, the most interesting part of the report lurking in the Law Commission’s recommendations is that the current report should be read alongside their August 2012 Harmful Digital Communicationsreport into cyberbullying in terms of the legal extensions into the online environment. The report into cyberbullying is focused on the concerns of teens and other individuals growing up in the digital environment, and how people are exposed to increased harassment that they are unable to counter. Online harassment is a serious issue in many countries, and the report argues for an emphasis on education around digital footprints, setting privacy settings, and a general emphasis on civil civic engagement online. But it is here where the debate gets interesting and a lot more murky.

In the previous report, the Law Commission recommends that there is up to a $2000 fine for bloggers and vexatious comments on blogs. While this might sound reasonable for extreme cases, the report argues that there needs to be a great deal of education in the blogging community as to what constitutes offence, making it seem like this barrel of laws could be open to future abuse. They also signal Twitter out as a potential area for further legislation (signaling that perhaps they haven’t seen the daily banter of politicians on Twitter – the debate can get quite fierce). The two reports together signal problems for journalists who tweet, as individual comments could open up their organizations to potential fines. The fines on blogging and on commenters on blogs would exist outside of the new media organization being set up. The Commission wants a Communications Commission set up, that processes complaints quickly, but where the accused has no right to protest the decision or represent themselves, a structure which signals that it could potentially be up for abuse. The previous report also signals a desire to legislate beyond the regulatory convergence that has largely dictated the internet, and a desire to eventually submit Facebook and Google to state laws. While in some cases state pressure has been positive on these organizations, such as Germany’s concerns around privacy on Facebook, in others it has led to the shutting down of political freedom (for example Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, London’s legislation to shut down the net after the riots, and so on). While New Zealand is unlikely to come down this hard on people, it is really important to ensure that we do not open up the internet for cases that could potentially shut down internet freedom and as TechLiberty highlight, this particular series of reports could be potentially open to abuse.

The worst drought in 70 years of records has renewed the focus in the media over whether these conditions might be related to climate change. At an estimated cost of $2 billion to the economy, the implications of the drought are huge for an industry which forms one of the primary sectors of our exports. While Joyce and English have light-footed around the issue, the Greens have argued that the National Party are not taking climate change seriously enough at detriment to our farmers. English fueled the Greens’ argument through his statement in the House last week that similar arguments on climate change had been made in Australia, and it had not stopped raining for the last five years. Unfortunately for English, he had overlooked the fact that Australia has been in drought for the last four years. Grilled by Corin Dann on Q+A on this gaffe, English produced some deft political sound bite maneuvering to shift his answer from focusing on climate change to focusing on the $500 million dedicated towards cleaning up waterways. While cleaning up waterways is great news, the Ministry for the Environment has predicted in their modelling that droughts are going to be more frequent, signalling that it is in New Zealand’s interest to think about the ongoing impact of climate change. Yet listening to the National Party leadership, climate change is often positioned as something that only environmentalists worry about.

While this article in the National Business Review somehow interpreted English not answering on climate change as leading on climate change, the issue of climate change is far less contentious than how it is often presented in the media. With 97% of publishing, peer-reviewed scientists agreeing that climate change is due to human activity (source: NASA), the arguments against it are often based on myth. It is not unusual to hear such myths bandied around as the temperature has not risen for the last 17 years, and the notion that because some parts of the world are cooling global warming is dismissed as an overall trend. Such myths propagate from the way that science is always interpreted through the lens of the social, an area that has received much more attention in literature since Bruno Latour and Thomas Kuhn paved the way for frameworks that examine how the reception of science is often based less on fact and more around the way that it taps or butts against notions of social consensus. Climate change and how we deal with it has also been influenced by the demands of industry, which has been based on the previous paradigm of exploiting resources, making it a touchy issue where legislation (such as carbon taxes) impact on the bottom line. This, together with confusion over the journalistic values of balance (which sees the skeptic side elevated despite broader scientific consensus) has clouded the issue. Moreover, climate change as an issue that requires nation state cooperation often butts against the internal interests of the nation state in requiring a much more global cooperation that transcends geopolitical factions.

Yet if it is not taken seriously in New Zealand, and often paraded as myth in the US media, there are indications that the defense industries are taking the IPCC’s predictions with much more weight. James Clapper is the current Director of National Intelligence and most senior security advisor to President Obama, overseeing 16 intelligence agencies. In the 2013 World Threat Assessment Report, Clapper trots out the usual geopolitical threats to US interests while highlighting the impact that climate change will have on migration and conflict. Clapper’s views reiterate that of the US Commander of the Pacific Navy, Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, who states that climate change is the biggest threat facing the Pacific. This threat, he argues, has led the US Navy to look at scenarios where they may have to work with China and India to manage the effects of climate change on populations. This news will not come as any surprise to anyone who follows US military policy. Since 2010, the Pentagon has had much more emphasis on the role of climate change and the pressure it places on resources to exacerbate conflicts. The Pentagon estimated in 2010 that more than 30 US military bases are at risk from sea levels rising and the instability caused by climate change led weather effects. In 2008, the Center for a New American Security conducted climate war games set in the year 2015 with 45 scientists and national security analysts from Asia, South Asia, Europe and America in an attempt to see how nations might collaborate to deal with escalating conflicts from climate change effects.

The focus from the US military should signal to the New Zealand government that while climate change threats are often taken as marginal by the media and the public, the science is entering the mainstream. This should not be taken as the need to secure ourselves against our Pacific neighbours – as this article from the AUT Pacific Media Centre shows, the Pacific Islands that surround us want to hold onto their sovereign nations and waters rather than migrating. However, in the context of looking at the ongoing impact of a greater frequency of drought, the notion of climate change needs to move to the centre of our discussions rather than remaining at the periphery.

The worst drought in 70 years of records has renewed the focus in the media over whether these conditions might be related to climate change. At an estimated cost of $2 billion to the economy, the implications of the drought are huge for an industry which forms one of the primary sectors of our exports. While Joyce and English have light-footed around the issue, the Greens have argued that the National Party are not taking climate change seriously enough at detriment to our farmers. English fueled the Greens’ argument through his statement in the House last week that similar arguments on climate change had been made in Australia, and it had not stopped raining for the last five years. Unfortunately for English, he had overlooked the fact that Australia has been in drought for the last four years. Grilled by Corin Dann on Q+A on this gaffe, English produced some deft political sound bite maneuvering to shift his answer from focusing on climate change to focusing on the $500 million dedicated towards cleaning up waterways. While cleaning up waterways is great news, the Ministry for the Environment has predicted in their modelling that droughts are going to be more frequent, signalling that it is in New Zealand’s interest to think about the ongoing impact of climate change. Yet listening to the National Party leadership, climate change is often positioned as something that only environmentalists worry about.

While this article in the National Business Review somehow interpreted English not answering on climate change as leading on climate change, the issue of climate change is far less contentious than how it is often presented in the media. With 97% of publishing, peer-reviewed scientists agreeing that climate change is due to human activity (source: NASA), the arguments against it are often based on myth. It is not unusual to hear such myths bandied around as the temperature has not risen for the last 17 years, and the notion that because some parts of the world are cooling global warming is dismissed as an overall trend. Such myths propagate from the way that science is always interpreted through the lens of the social, an area that has received much more attention in literature since Bruno Latour and Thomas Kuhn paved the way for frameworks that examine how the reception of science is often based less on fact and more around the way that it taps or butts against notions of social consensus. Climate change and how we deal with it has also been influenced by the demands of industry, which has been based on the previous paradigm of exploiting resources, making it a touchy issue where legislation (such as carbon taxes) impact on the bottom line. This, together with confusion over the journalistic values of balance (which sees the skeptic side elevated despite broader scientific consensus) has clouded the issue. Moreover, climate change as an issue that requires nation state cooperation often butts against the internal interests of the nation state in requiring a much more global cooperation that transcends geopolitical factions.

Yet if it is not taken seriously in New Zealand, and often paraded as myth in the US media, there are indications that the defense industries are taking the IPCC’s predictions with much more weight. James Clapper is the current Director of National Intelligence and most senior security advisor to President Obama, overseeing 16 intelligence agencies. In the 2013 World Threat Assessment Report, Clapper trots out the usual geopolitical threats to US interests while highlighting the impact that climate change will have on migration and conflict. Clapper’s views reiterate that of the US Commander of the Pacific Navy, Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, who states that climate change is the biggest threat facing the Pacific. This threat, he argues, has led the US Navy to look at scenarios where they may have to work with China and India to manage the effects of climate change on populations. This news will not come as any surprise to anyone who follows US military policy. Since 2010, the Pentagon has had much more emphasis on the role of climate change and the pressure it places on resources to exacerbate conflicts. The Pentagon estimated in 2010 that more than 30 US military bases are at risk from sea levels rising and the instability caused by climate change led weather effects. In 2008, the Center for a New American Security conducted climate war games set in the year 2015 with 45 scientists and national security analysts from Asia, South Asia, Europe and America in an attempt to see how nations might collaborate to deal with escalating conflicts from climate change effects.

The focus from the US military should signal to the New Zealand government that while climate change threats are often taken as marginal by the media and the public, the science is entering the mainstream. This should not be taken as the need to secure ourselves against our Pacific neighbours – as this article from the AUT Pacific Media Centre shows, the Pacific Islands that surround us want to hold onto their sovereign nations and waters rather than migrating. However, in the context of looking at the ongoing impact of a greater frequency of drought, the notion of climate change needs to move to the centre of our discussions rather than remaining at the periphery.

In the Prime Minister’s post-Cabinet conference earlier last month, John Key reiterated the reasons why any New Zealander who is concerned about the issue of human rights should be concerned about the closer ties with Australia over immigration issues. Positioning his decision to take 150 refugees from Australia as part of the refugee quota of 700 per year, Key indicated that part of the bilateral agreement would be to collaborate on immigration. Signaling that he was not opposed to the possibility of a joint detention centre in the Pacific, or letting Australia determine who were refugees by drawing on their intelligence resources, Key argued there was little political risk in pooling our resources as mates.

The debate over immigration has not reached the same level of intensity or scrutiny as in Australia. Since there has not yet been a boat that has reached New Zealand, Key’s attempts in the past to rustle up support for his immigration policies by alarming the population about the possibility of boat people have been met with a resounding rejection from the media, who have pointed to the implausibility of this scenario.

Yet the calls for closer collaboration with a country that has a dismal human rights record on immigration processing should be subject to much more scrutiny. The notion of processing refugees offshore rather than in Australia began with the Tampa crisis in August 2001, where Australia under the Howard government effectively let a ship of 438 refugees sink despite surveilling their movements. Closer to Christmas Island than to Indonesia, Australia hurriedly rushed through a bill that reiterated Australian sovereignty to determine who landed in their country. The Norwegian liner the MV Tampa came to the rescue, sparking an intense diplomatic standoff between Norway and Australia as Australia denied their obligation under international law. Australia responded by doing a deal with the impoverished nation of Nauru for the refugees to be held there, with New Zealand taking 150 people. Some people were stuck there for years, with 32 remaining four years later. Australia up taking most of the refugees after spending $600,000 per person holding them in detention centres. One of the refugees ended up on Nauru alone, at the astonishing cost of $23,000 per day.

While Labour dismantled the refugee when they got into power, Gillard changed position and signaled her willingness to reopen Nauru as well as looking at detention centres in Malaysia and Indonesia (both countries with poor human rights records), as well as the possibility of redrawing the migration zone as recommended by a special committee into immigration. The Nauru centre opened in September last year, taking on 400 refugees. The stories that are coming out of there are harrowing – two months in, the Nauru government still had this people living in tents rather than permanent housing. There have been acute water shortages, leaving families without water. The conditions and stress of being in limbo have led some refugees to attempt suicide. Nine Iranians have stitched their lips with a total of 20-30 on hunger strikes. Amnesty has said that it will be months before Nauru has the ability to properly process these refugees.

For those who say that off-shore processing centres are an effective means of discouraging boats, the research overwhelmingly concludes that the push factors in the home countries are a more determinant factor over whether people will risk fleeing in a boat, making this Australian tax payer funded ad below in Pakistan more of a waste of money than focusing on effective methods to deal with refugees. It is clear that Australia is also violating international law in their use of offshore facilities, which requires them to deal with refugees humanely and quickly – a fact that led the UN Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to slam Australia for their human rights record in November last year. The situation does not look to improve, with just last week Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner being denied visitation to assess human rights in Nauru and Manus Island by the Solicitor General.

It is clear that before we cozy up to our Tasman neighbours, we should be asking the same question as many Australian commentators – how brutal do we want to be?

The images on Monday night were dramatic. Four West Auckland teenage girls steal a car and cause havoc in Mission Bay, with the night ending in a tragic police pursuit that saw three of the teenagers in critical care after smashing their car into a traffic barrier. It was traumatizing for the police involved, dangerous for the public and a split second decision that would alter the life of these young women. Positioned as an exceptional event that was the inevitable result of stupid decision-making, the media glossed over the way Monday’s crash taps into a broader debate on police chases.

Sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term ‘moral panic’ in his 1972 study of Mods and Rockers to explain the way that the mass media demonizes certain groups in society by positioning them as a threat to the dominant moral order. In doing so, we lose our ability to think rationally about the issues around these groups, and our response becomes more punitive and blown out of proportion. Youth constitute one of the key groups that these panics tend to circulate around, amplified by the sense of nostalgia for past days that constructs a narrative for the need to control and reassert the social order. Cohen’s work is particularly interesting in the case of police chases, because although the discussion of these chases often revolves around the desire to be punitive, this desire functions at the expense of a rational discussion that enables us to reduce the harm that these cause to innocent bystanders, policemen, and the criminals themselves.

While the crash that critically injured the three teenagers this week might seem like an exception – after all, one minute hardly seems like a chase – it is actually more typical in duration than you might expect. International research tells us that the majority of car chases are under 5 minutes, and a quarter are over within 2 minutes. In New Zealand, one in four chases will end in a crash, making this tiny fraction of time that the hunted and their pursues make their decisions incredibly important.

Many might contest that the decision to flee is indicative of guilt for a more serious offence. However, the IPCA’s 2009 review is that the majority of people likely to flee from police were not people who had committed serious offences. This data falls in line with international research on the rise of car chases. More than a third of police chases were over non-imprisonable traffic offences, and another 9% were the result of police stopping a car for no specific reason. In contrast, only 23% of police chases were in pursuit of people that were known criminal offenders. Who are the most likely to make the decision to flee? The IPCA found that 40% were aged 20 years old and under, with another 30% falling in the 20-39 year old range.

So why would some people without previous prison convictions choose to flee on the basis of a minor traffic infringement? Like other research in psychology that tells us we are less individual than we think – that under the right conditions anyone might have the potential to torture another or become part of a riot – the international research seems to indicate that the decision to flee is partially founded in a split-second, fuelled by high adrenalin and panic. While some people might feel this when they hear a siren and stop, others in this fight or flight mode decide to flee. Police are no less immune to these kinds of pressure, with research revealing that some police in chases also being overcome by adrenalin – a phenomenon of rage and excitement that is referred to as the ‘red mist’. This research reveals that once police make the decision to chase, they can find it difficult to stop even if the conditions are dangerous.

So how can we reduce the phenomenon of teenagers and thirty-somethings fleeing the police at high cost to public and police safety? Well, as the IPCA suggested in 2009, the research tells us that most people slow down within two blocks if they are not chased, meaning minor infractions should not result in police chases – a policy recommendation that was ignored. If this sounds too difficult, this is something that the LAPD believed would reduce police pursuits by up to 60% in 2003. While the application of this policy was not consistent, Texas has managed to reduce their fatalities by focusing on public safety and a similar debate is occurring in Australia. While we eventually might see technology that disables the car motors of errant drivers, for now the best approach seems to be harm minimization that aims at creating safer conditions for communities and the police that patrol them. As police car chase expert and Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of North Carolina Geoff Alpert argues, the division in statistics between death-injury-crash remain fairly consistent across all states regardless of their policy. He argues that most people will reduce speed when they feel like they are no longer being chased, making a violent felon only policy an effective method for harm reduction. And if that seems too lenient, consider this statistic from the International Association of Chiefs of Police – 72% of police chases end for a reason that is completely out of the police’s hands.

When Geoff Bertram sent an advance copy of his upcoming chapter on electricity prices, he did not expect the level of interest he would receive in his work. Bertram, a Senior Associate for the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University, argues in a chapter for the upcoming book Evolution of Global Electricity Markets: New paradigms, new challenges, new approaches (to be released in June 2013) that the electricity prices in New Zealand have surged at twice the rate of nearly every other developed country in the last 30 years, and are now more than twice what they were in the 1980s. While much of the public interest has been focused on the Maori Council’s loss at the Supreme Court this week, paving the way for National to float shares in Mighty River Power as soon as possible, Bertram’s work echoes that of other electricity consultants and highlights that the problem with power might be much larger than it appears in the public arena.

Even with state ownership over the last three decades, Bertram’s work highlights some alarming trends that have seen New Zealanders overcharged by millions of dollars on their electricity. With prices more than a third than Australia and double that of South Korea, Bertram argues that the regulation of the current system favours the electricity company over the consumer.

Similarly, electricity consultant Bryan Leyland points to the deregulation of power since the 1980s, arguing that the system is geared towards producing electricity shortages and high prices to provide return for investors. In a recent article for Stuff, he argues that the Commerce Commission and Electricity Authority are woefully uninformed when it comes to the load management of power to prepare for dry times. He points to the way that Genesis is shutting down two power generators in Huntly as they prepare to float shares on the market. The board has reported profits of an additional $6 million, up to $192 million as they ready the state owned enterprise for floating shares on the stockmarket. A report by Ernst and Young shows that the SOEs have outperformed private power companies in terms of returns to their shareholders while readying for the partial privatization of these assets. While this is done for the benefit of short-term economic gain, Leyland argues the result is that when we next have a dry period (as we did in 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2008), the costs are then passed onto the consumers. He also argues that there is a need to limit the way that lines companies can pass their costs directly onto the consumers, as Orion Energy is currently doing in Christchurch to cover the costs of damaged infrastructure following the earthquake.

National’s ability to sell this partial privatization to voters is crucial to their success in the 2014 election. It is, after all, the policy that they campaigned on in the last election, so to end their second term without having completed the sales is detrimental. Despite John Key’s repeated claims that this constitutes a mandate, the vote on the Mixed Ownership Model Bill was incredibly tight, with Peter Dunne’s single United Future vote providing the majority. The sell down of these assets remains one of the most unpopular policies in recent history – with some polls stating that as many as 75% of voters are opposed. The Greens claim to have 400,000 signatures already for their push towards a Citizen Initiated Referendum, but due to the non-binding nature of such referenda it is easy for the Government to ignore, or push out until after the shares sales are already underway. Treasury have expressed their concerns that the drive within National to sell all of the power companies before the end of their term may lead to an oversaturated market and minimal returns.

Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First have all argued that the partial privatization of assets is likely to increase prices. As New Zealand First’s Energy spokesman Andrew Williams highlights, one downside to the Mixed Ownership Model Bill is that it effectively removes any legislative requirement for social responsibility on behalf of these companies. And this is potentially bad news for the consumer, as the incentive shifts to looking after the company in returning dividends rather than the consumer. While Joyce has been citing Powershop in the House to progress the line that private power companies are cheaper than state owned ones, according to the Ministry of Economic Development’s February 2012 report on electricity prices, the privately owned Contact Energy is more expensive than the state owned companies in Auckland South, Wellington South, Christchurch and Dunedin. National’s argument that the shares are likely to remain in New Zealand hands also seems dubious, with National’s 1999 sale of Contact Energy changing to a 51% majority foreign ownership (Australian company Origin Energy) within five years.

While both Leyland and Bertram point to the history of high power prices in New Zealand to argue that the problem is not one of ownership, Leyland argues that once the partial privatization of these assets occurs the opportunity is lost to address these problems with regulation. Bertram’s much anticipated chapter is not available until the book is published in June, and in this case is perhaps too little too late. But the message on power prices is clear: reforms such as these should not be rushed through at the expense of due process on the basis of an election promise.

Phoebe Fletcher – Phoebe teaches at Massey University in Film, Television and Media Studies. Her views are her own

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/02/28/partial-asset-sales-highlight-need-for-electricity-regulation/feed/10About Phoebe Fletcherhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/02/21/about-phoebe-fletcher/
Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:56:35 +0000http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=1615Phoebe Fletcher – Phoebe teaches at Massey University in Film, Television and Media Studies. She is a former blogger for Tumeke, and has appeared as a political panelist on RadioLive, and the television shows The Sunday News Roast Club, Let’s Be Frank, iPredict and Citizen A.

Phoebe has a keen interest in foreign affairs and is completing her PhD on the role of the splatter film in defining American discourses on war and torture.